Thinking of the future of Toronto and its rental housing needs in 2013 and beyond, I decided to talk to three people familiar with the issues.

When you leave decision about housing to city planners with strategic goals, you end up with mixed income developments like Regent Park or the West Don Lands, says Toronto City Councillor Pam McConnell, pictured in front of her Regent Park condo building.

Thinking of the future of Toronto and its rental housing needs in 2013 and beyond, I decided to talk to three people familiar with the issues. As background, I’ve come to think of Toronto’s rental housing market as having three tiers: affordable housing for citizens with low incomes who need some level of subsidy to get decent accommodation; reasonably-priced, market-priced rental housing for the middle class, especially families; and a niche market of people who want, and can afford, high-end rental units (and choose, for various reasons, not to buy).

For those who want high-end rentals, Toronto has more condos under construction than New York and, according to real estate research firm Urbanation, 25,000 to 28,000 condo units will be completed in 2013. Assuming the same is true as in 2011, about 35 per cent of them will be offered as rentals.

More important for Toronto’s future is its ability to provide reasonably-priced and affordable housing, what Kevin Stolarick, research director of The Martin Prosperity Institute in the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, calls “worker housing.” He mentions a story Rocco Rossi told when running for mayor. A woman, who lives in a distant northeastern part of Scarborough, works on the housekeeping staff at the Royal York Hotel. She spends hours, mainly on buses, getting from her home to her relatively low-paying job and home again.

“Many people would say that’s a public transit problem,” says Stolarick. “Well, no, it’s really an affordable housing problem. There was a time when people doing housekeeping and other service jobs in downtown Toronto lived downtown. Now they can’t afford to. We can put in subways and light rail and add more buses to try to improve that poor woman’s life, but in the end, the real solution is to have affordable housing close to where she works.”

The building of reasonably-priced housing used to be driven by investment from the federal and provincial governments, which led to many non-profits and co-ops being built in the 1970s and ’80s. That ended in the mid ’90s when federal funding began to decline and Mike Harris’ Progressive Conservative government downloaded the province’s affordable housing file to municipalities that often couldn’t afford to repair their aging stock, let alone build new housing for an expanding population.

As McConnell argues, “When the city is engaged in the building of communities, we can regulate within the planning regime but we have no ability to do that in the condo market. When you leave it to the market, the market will build condos, condos, condos. When you leave it to planners and city builders with strategic goals, you end up with mixed income developments like Regent Park or West Don Lands.”

The issue isn’t restricted to the downtown core; it affects the suburbs, too. “Not everyone wants to, or needs to, live in the urban centre,” says McConnell. “But, for example, shift workers, like those who work at the airport or the airport hotels, often have to be on the job very early, before the public transportation system is fully running. They need to live relatively close to where they work. So in the suburbs there’s an incredible need for reasonably-priced rental accommodation, places those workers can afford given their pay cheques.”

But, McConnell adds, suburban homeowners often fight any effort to open up renting opportunities, as has been the case with basement units. “We had a big pushback from homeowners not wanting their neighbours to have tenants,” she says. “There’s still a lack of understanding that when you have a diverse socio-economic and cultural population, you get a more vibrant mix. When you polarize communities you set up ghettoization and that means trouble.”

One strategy to achieve social housing goals is called inclusionary, or discretionary, zoning. Using a policy and regulatory framework, city planners require developers to include a percentage of affordable housing in any multi-residential development to guarantee mixed income neighbourhoods. Introduced in the U.S. in the 1970s, Vancouver has a formal inclusionary policy (developers must make 20 per cent of all units created by rezoning affordable), and so does Montreal.

“When a developer says he wants to build a 20- or 30-storey condo in Montreal,” says David Hulchanski, associate director of the U of T’s Cities Centre, “the city will say something like, ‘OK, good, but we give you a licence to print money by rezoning the land and you’re going to give the city what? How about 15 per cent affordable housing?’

“In Toronto, I think the majority of Council would be in favour of something like that and certainly our former mayor was, but the province won’t give the city that authority.”

In Ontario, applications and appeals relating to planning decisions are heard by the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB), an arm’s-length provincial body. As Hulchanski says, “I’m a strong advocate of inclusionary zoning but it has to be done correctly. There’s a cost to making 15 per cent of a new development affordable housing, but so long as everybody has to pay that cost, the value of land will adjust because whoever owns the land will know about this new condition. If it’s ‘let’s-make-a-deal’ at the OMB and some get away without meeting the inclusionary zoning requirement, then it won’t work.”

Last year, Toronto’s City Council asked the province to release it from the OMB’s jurisdiction because the organization was thought to bend so readily to the wishes of developers. Until that happens, the city is limited in its ability to control planning so providing affordable and reasonably-priced rental housing will remain an uphill battle.

David Hayes is an author and award-winning feature writer who has been a renter most of his life. If you have stories or information to share about renting, he can be reached at lifelong_renter@sympatico.ca .

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